Naomi Cunningham

Naomi Cunningham is a barrister specialising in employment and discrimination law and a member of Outer Temple Chambers. She has written extensively on the law relating to sex and gender and the tensions between the rights of women and those with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment. She has given evidence in 2021 and 2023 to the Women and Equalities Select Committee and in 2022 to the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee of the Scottish Parliament.

Her past work in this area has included Fair Play For Women’s judicial review of official guidance on the sex question in the Census; the challenge to the lawfulness of the EHRC’s Code of Practice in AEA v EHRC; FOI appeals involving information held by the Judicial College and the Crown Prosecution Service; a published advice for FiLiA on lesbian-only spaces; and confidential advice for major public sector and government clients. She is currently instructed in a challenge to the refusal by the Brighton Survivors’ Network to provide single-sex group counselling, and a claim against a regulator for subjecting a social worker to regulatory action on grounds of her gender-critical belief.

She blogs regularly on the law at Legal Feminist. She was named by The Lawyer as one of their “Hot 100” for 2022.